An inconvenient scientist or two

Considering the source and the subject, I’m declaring Alex Beam’s Boston Globe column on MIT professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen the best of the day: “MIT’s inconvient scientist.” Another inconvenient scientist in Professor Lindzen’s Cambridge neighborhood is physicist Russell Seitz. Seitz has now established Adamant, his own blog. Scrolling down through his first posts on the site, I see this:

As summer sizzles on, pundits are warming to Al Gore’s popcorn film debut. One of the things that make An Inconvenient Truth a scary movie is that in its certitude it ignores our past, present and future dependence on the greatest of native American fuel sources. Al may dream of fields of switch grass as biofuel frenzy spreads, but coal remains the mainstay of America’s power supply.

I wrote Seitz earlier this week to ask what he was up to on his site. He responded:

Science politicized is science betrayed.

Adamant focuses on advances in science and international security, and how the rhetoric of motives distorts them in public television, often thoughtless think tanks, and both sides of the aisle in a Congress where lawyers outnumber scientists 30 to 1.

It also affords respite from the Science Wars by surveying bizarre things that surface in the 36,000 ostensibly learned journals to which Harvard’s library’s subscribes.